What Has Happened To Music ??????

[Sagebrush Tom]

Yes there is plenty of good music being made today if you know where to find it. I tired of classic rock stations years ago and most of the music made during that time. And of course i learned a few of them just to satisfy my aging friends and family members.
There are some great radio stations out there that their format is Americana that includes music from the past to the latest offerings.
Tom

[TBman]

I'm stuck on the "booing Black Sabbath" part, lol.

[rmgjsps]

Originally Posted by Tico

I remember when J.S. Bach played ... before electricity.

What has happened to Music, indeed!

"Ahhh, Bach." (Obscure MASH reference)

AND: "Hey, you kids, get offa my lawn!"

[Bob Womack]

Originally Posted by HHP

I'm pretty sure Davey Jones did his own tambourine parts. I tried for years to make it as a studio tambourine player and got nowhere.

Shoulda played cowbell.

Bob

[HHP]

I wouldn't worry, music tends to be "self-correcting". As any music wins widespread popularity, it tends to get more and more complex until it becomes meaningless and collapses under its own weight. The collapse gives birth to a simpler, more meaningful form that starts the process over again.

[Silurian]

Originally Posted by HHP

I wouldn't worry, music tends to be "self-correcting". As any music wins widespread popularity, it tends to get more and more complex until it becomes meaningless and collapses under its own weight. The collapse gives birth to a simpler, more meaningful form that starts the process over again.

Good point, in the UK this is often used to explain how the Sex Pistols and punk in general arose from the bloated excesses of prog rock.

Whether punk was more 'meaningful' is of course largely subjective.

[ship of fools]

After all of these years to me video killed the radio song in more ways then one, while I have no problem with the entertainment of performers there was never any separation form music and performance ( ie: dancing and stage shows and such ).
And then we saw the video ( Much music ) starting to move the line from musical performance to a full blown stage show's and we saw things that took the musical parts out of shows performers like Madonna/ Brittany Spears who started to sexualize the music and then we went to lip sync performing so they couldn't sing live in front of audiences.
I have no problem for those that want to do performance shows and use auto tuning or voice overs or even electronic music but we need to not see these as music performers as they are nothing more in my mind but entertainers who do shows for ones entertainment.
I really do not want to go to a concert and see young girls out there who are dancing around semi naked and say I went to listen to music we know why but it doesn't make it right or even good music.
Now a days it just seems not very many are interested in the actual sound or songs or how well they play except for a very few and guess what we are the very few.
It is really up to us to steer the young generation to see and feel the music that is in them and to try and stay pure to actually playing instruments and to insist that the entertainment part is not part of their shows, remember this.
Teach teach your children well only time will tell.
born in the early 1950's and will love those that were before me and made beautiful noise for those on this earth to enjoy and hopefully brings them happiness and a smile to their face and I am doing my part by getting my grand kids interested in MAKING BEAUTIFUL NOISE. ship

[J Patrick]

...I will only say that I have been enjoying live music performances on a regular basis for years and see no end in sight to that...in the last month I saw Jesse Cook and Bill Frisell...next month I'm catching the Hot Sardines and in May I've got tickets to see David Byrne....and festival season is coming up...Woohoo!!...the great music is out there but if you don't go check it out it's not gonna wow you...and btw there's plenty of great radio available if you listen to the right stations...

[Davis Webb]

Originally Posted by pagedr

Hate to tell you, but there are a load of bands today that play their own instruments, don't use autotune or backup dancers, etc. Have you tried looking for current bands to listen to or do you just base this on what you see on TV/hear on the radio?

You like the Eagles? Try listening to the The Wild Feathers. Allman Brothers/Skynyrd? Try Chris Stapleton. Led Zeppelin? Give Greta Van Fleet a listen. Beatles/Stones/Generic Brit Rock? Listen to Arctic Monkeys. I could go on.

There was a recent thread here with current good Americana music, try that out if that's more your style. I just went and saw Langhorne Slim a couple weeks ago at the Largo and he put on a fantastic show, just him and his guitar on stage (Twain opened and was also incredibly talented). No offense, but this thread is the kind of thing I would hear from my grandfather.

That is not the point of the OP. Of course there is still good music. But almost no one hear has heard of Greta Van Fleet nor Arctic Monkeys. He is asking about why popular music has degenerated into garbage, which it has.

[Goodallboy]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

It's an interesting response to a genuine question. In today's culture the "new" is right and the old is "wrong" and anyone who prefers the old is bad. Interesting.

There's another angle to this discussion that might be more specific and might provide a more "meaty" subject to discuss: Back in the '70s I noticed a continuum between a couple of poles in the music industry. At one pole were musicians who played their music and the music was the center of their work. Onstage they basically came out and played their music and the crowd enjoyed that music and considered the music to be the point of the concert. At the other pole were performers who performed music but the music was a tool to support their performance. Their audiences came to witness an even and the music was part of it but pageantry, sets, dancing, effects, and/or costumes, were expected.

I describe this as a continuum because on one hand music was the whole point of the band and on the other, stage performance was the whole point and music was simply an element. In between the poles there were bands who crossed over into the other poles territory. I was fascinated by the continuum and tried to figure out where I wanted to fit. Once I noticed the continuum, I evaluated bands in terms of it.

What I noticed was that over time the performance aspect began to be more important than the music aspect of what is called the music industry. Was it motivated by the audience or was it simply what was offered by the record companies? I can't answer for you but I can give you an example:

In the 1990s I served as a recording engineer for a "star search" TV show put on by a record company. There were six candidate acts and one of them was going to earn a record contract. In the final round we were down to three: a singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar, a six-piece jazz-fusion band, and a boy-girl duo who sang to tracks. The singer-songwriter was excellent. He played well, sang his excellent original songs well, and was very camera-friendly. The duo were dressed in rad, up-to-the-second, sexy clothes, and the female knew how to shake her thing. Their songs were repetitive, simple, and splashy. The jazz band was absolutely stunning. Their music was complex but accessible, they were camera-friendly and engaging, but the music was the thing. They had the audience eating out of their hand.

At the end of the competition the crew and production people stood around and opined who they thought should win and all agreed the jazz band should win by a landslide and the singer-songwriter should come in second. The studio audience was polled and had the same opinion. The judges return with their verdict: the duo won. I asked the show's producer, a friend of mine and one of the judges, how that could happen? He said, "Bobby, the jazz band didn't have a chance. The record company wasn't going to pay to travel a six-piece and they wanted performers rather than musicians."

That was in the middle of the metamorphosis I watched in the industry. It has continued to swing towards the emphasis on performance over music. Just because there are still pub bands performing (in an admittedly shrinking and challenging bar band industry) and a few music centers such as Nashville and Austin where music-centric bands thrive doesn't mean there isn't a creep in the industry towards performance-based acts. I look at country music and see it. Despite some virtuosity, I see Americana as a genre mostly based upon stage performance with fairly simple retro music.

Does that offer a little more specific detail to discuss without bashing the OP?

Bob

This is an excellent observation and it describes what I see from many of the musical “acts” of today. The audience doesn’t care so why change it? When you’re raised on medicrity it’s impossible to recognize as such.

[The Watchman]

Telling young people their popular music is crap is one of the duties of old age.

[tbeltrans]

Observing all this, both the threads that talk about it and the cultural changes, what I see is simply the world around us changing and many of us from the "way things were" not wanting to accept that.

As an adult, I have tried to put myself in my Dad's place when I hear, say, a Beatles tune. He grew up on music played by skilled musicians in the form of big band, singers performing the Great American Songbook, and the like. Then come along the Beatles and me-too groups, with all the screaming, pounding, and guitar slinging. I would not have wanted to live through the 1960s as an older adult. It must have been really scary to see society as they knew it, disintegrate into riots, drugs, and other forms of major civil disobedience. It must have been a real shock to him and folks like him. Now, it is our turn.

Tony

[Woodstock School Of Music]

Originally Posted by HHP

I wouldn't worry, music tends to be "self-correcting". As any music wins widespread popularity, it tends to get more and more complex until it becomes meaningless and collapses under its own weight. The collapse gives birth to a simpler, more meaningful form that starts the process over again.

Yup a another example is the demise of the over glamorous in your face 80's metal bands which led us to the Nirvana era. The anti 80's band

Originally Posted by Davis Webb

He is asking about why popular music has degenerated into garbage, which it has.

Popular music was garbage in the 70s, too. Remember Tony Orlando and Dawn? Donny Osmond? Captain and Tennille? Bay City Rollers? Disco? The bands the OP enjoyed, like Yes and Humble Pie, were hardly mainstream.

I think we all tend to look at the past through rose-colored glasses, reminiscing about a time that never really was.

[taylorgtr]

Originally Posted by lodi_55

You "boo'd" Black Sabbath offstage? Seriously?

As pointed out above, Jimi Hendrix got booed when he opened for The Monkees.

One of my favorite stories is when Jackson Browne was getting ready to play the MUSE festival, Springsteen was scheduled to be on later. Someone told him - "If if sounds like they're booing, they're not. They're just yelling BRUUUUUCE!".

Jackson Browne replied -

"What's the difference?"


There is a lot of good music out there - it's just not on radio...or at least terrestrial radio. On satellite and streaming, you can narrowcast any type or style you want....and there's some good (real) music coming out that's not just a collection of sampled beats - Mumford and Sons, Dawes, St. Paul and The Broken Bones, Leon Bridges, Avett Brothers - and tons of others. You just have to look for them.

Speaking of good music - I have to give a plug for my high school buddies (even though we've been out of high school for a long time).

http://www.wooldridgebrothers.com/

Here's a sample vid. There's a lot more.